Dear Principal,

I believe community service should not be mandatory. Many students do sports or are in clubs and if you made it mandatory students would not have time for these activities. Students would probably blow off the community service anyway and do whatever they want. A third and final reason is that some community service takes long hours after school. If you will continue reading, I have more to say.

Students would not have time for clubs if community service was mandatory. Some clubs or sports have a positive influence on students, such as meting new people. I was on the cross country team for three years in a row. I met some good friends there. If community service was mandatory then this would not exist and students would miss very valuable opportunities. Another example is that sometimes, clubs help the school. At my school we have the helping hands club. You can tell by the name that this club helps the school. This club would have no time after school and our school would not be the place it is today.

Another reason is that some students would blow off the community service. This would mainly be the ones who did not do community service in the first place. In this scenario, there would be no point in making community service mandatory at all. I can pretty much guarantee that the ones who didn't do community service in the first place would not do it anyway. Besides, some students already help the community without calling it "community service". Some students do nice things for people but don't consider that community service.

My third reason is that community service takes too long after school. When the average student gets home, all they usually think about is getting away from the stress at school. They don't want to get more work to worry about. Community service also might intrude on their sleep time too. If a student does community service right after school, they would then have to do their homework, sometimes students barely make it to bed with homework alone. If you threw in community service on top of that, image how little sleep students would get.

Community service should be a choice, not mandatory. Sometimes students serve the community with the little things they do every day, like RELATIVE_NAME's challenge says. Clubs and organisations are important to a student too and with community service around there would be no time. Some students might not even do the service at all. And it takes too long which may result in sleep loss. I hope you take my views into consideration.

Gratefully,

Anonymous student.